Lauren Nurse: There’s always room on the broom – Donald O’Born Family Scholarship Exhibition

Installation view of There's always room on the broom, by Lauren Nurse

Installation view of There's always room on the broom, by Lauren Nurse

Installation view of There's always room on the broom, by Lauren Nurse

Installation view of There's always room on the broom, by Lauren Nurse

Installation view of There's always room on the broom, by Lauren Nurse

Installation view of There's always room on the broom, by Lauren Nurse


Project Space
Lauren Nurse: There’s always room on the broom – Donald O’Born Family Scholarship Exhibition

October 27, 2011 – November 26, 2011

From October 27 through November 26, 2011, Open Studio was pleased to present the 2011 Scholarship/Fellowship Exhibitions, featuring artists Tara Cooper (Nick Novak Fellowship), Lauren Nurse (Donald O’Born Family Scholarship), and Flora Shum (Don Phillips Scholarship). Each year, Open Studio awards three scholarships/fellowships, providing artists working in print media with both professional support and access to studio facilities to create new work during a one-year period. All three artists gave illustrated talks about their work and the progress of their projects over the year on Thursday, October 27, 2011 at Open Studio, followed by an opening reception. For further information about our scholarship program, please click on Scholarships on the menu to the left.

Cultural perceptions of nature have always held a certain amount of anxiety, and have spawned numerous myths, legends and fables. These narratives expose culture’s uneasy relationship with the natural world; the figure of the werewolf is the ultimate symbol for the transgression between human and animal, and fears about being consumed are embodied in the figure of the vampire. In viewing the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body, Nurse considers the mythic as a symbolic expression of the cultural unease that pervades a society and shapes its collective behaviour.

Previous work has revolved around the idea of collisions between nature and culture—passing comment on some of the ways in which we see nature as existing outside of culture and society, yet simultaneously influencing the ways in which we live. The work in There’s always room on the broom synthesizes the artist’s previous interest in the modern separation and opposition between culture and nature, and her current interest in locating the mythological/uncanny in evocations of the ‘wild’. She is interested in the dissolution of boundaries between categories, ideas, and objects, the tension between inside and outside, and the intersections that occur when borders of the body become fluid and porous.

Lauren Nurse (Donald O’Born Family Scholar) is a Québecer living and working in Toronto. She is a graduate of Concordia University’s Print Media program, and recently completed York University’s MFA program. She has participated in exhibitions in Toronto, Montreal, New Mexico and Italy, and attended residency programs at Montréal’s Atelier de L’ile, Atelier Circulaire, the Vermont Studio Center, Newfoundland’s Pouch Cove Foundation and Muskoka’s Tree Museum Sculpture Garden. Recent exhibitions include an off-site project at the Blackwood Gallery, and a two-person exhibition at Board of Directors. She teaches Print Media and Design at Sheridan College, and Lithography at OCAD and York University. Her current work explores intersections between real and fictive environments.